Slashdot Mirror
Sore Thumbs and Texting
Ant writes "ABC News reports that text messaging, once seen as a way to send a short message without running up the expense of a cellular telephone/cell phone call, has become so popular that it poses its own public health problem: sore thumbs.
This comes from a survey and warning put out by Virgin Mobile, one of the largest cellular service providers in Great Britain. Virgin reports that 93 million text messages are sent every day in the United Kingdom (U.K.). One estimate for the United States (U.S.), whose population is five times as large, is 700 million text messages a year.
"
Has anyone sued the phone maker, text message service, or anyone else they can think of getting money from? Seems like that's the next story we'll see following all thse people with sore thumbs who need someone other than themselves to blame.
It's just a poll, actually. So they have sore thumbs...big deal.
"once seen as a way to send a short message without running up the expense of a cellular telephone/cell phone call"
My text messages cost 10 cents per message. I'd have to talk for over 2 minutes to cost more than a text message and I can sure relay more information in that two minutes than most can in a text message and even get feedback during that time. Text messages have their uses but being cheaper isn't one of them. Besides, I thought the point of text messages was to annoy others trying to watch a movie in a movie theater.
waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
seriously. That's like complaining about your legs hurting after walking 200ft, because you usually just do laps from the fridge to the couch. You can avoid soreness in your thumbs the same way you avoid soreness everywhere else: stretch your muscles (try shadow thumb wrestling), repetition, and don't go till it hurts. You know when you're getting near that point, just stop there.
IANAPFE (I am not a physical fitness expert), but I do play a lot of video games, A LOT of video games, and between that and the literally hundreds of thousands of characters I type on a daily basis for work, I've learned how to deal with digit soreness.
How Jaded Are You?
video game controllers? Sorry, but there's no way texting is as rough on the thumbs as bingeing on Gran Turismo. maybe for a few 1337 texters who text a couple hundred wpm, but they need to stop with the "texting = public health crisis" line. there's no way it's true.
By my definition, a health problem is something that you need medication or a doctor's appointment for. If your thumbs hurt you, taking a break from texting is all you really need. An alternative would be to try holding the phone in your hand a different way- after all, a repetitive strain injury is a repetitive strain injury.
I'm a signature virus. Copy me to your signature so I can replicate, and introduce your own mutations so I can evolve.
While it certainly has it's uses. It does seem over-used.
Pros for me:
-Have my computer send me alerts.
-Send a quick e-mail to someone from the road.
-Send a short message to someone discreetly in a location where talking on the phone would be rude/inappropriate.
-Get a message through to someone when the reception is there but not good enough to have a conversation.
Cons for me:
-Almost have driven off the road on various occasions while trying to punch in a message or read a message. Way more dangerous then just talking.
-Time consuming to communicate the simplist of concepts.
-Sore thumbs
-U.S. carrier pricing on text messages makes it not make much sense economically.
-Additional way of being in-personal in your communication with other human beings.
-Short messages can be easilly mis-interpreted. Have gotten several people mad at me for no reason just because they took a brief text message the wrong way.
well, 93 million a day. i apologise for being petty.
texting (sending an sms message) is much more popular in the UK and europe in general than it is in the states, mainly because initially the infrastructure was terrible, a very large proportion of messages were lost when sending abroad or to other networks, this has been resolved but people in general do not have the same sense of trust in the technology as they do in other countries.
imagine that in your first year of emailing more than half of your emails did not get through. this is looking through the eyes of a consumer, say you sent your first email in '98 and it didnt go through, what would you think of email? you might avoid it for a while, the same seems to have happened with sms in the states.
i agree entirely with your point as to the misleading figures, its appalling that someone would write that, especially considering the fact that it could be much more dramatic with the US population sending 700 million a year and the uk upwards of 30 BILLION.
and another point, virgin is nowhere near being a leading UK mobile phone company, the big four are 02, Vodafone, Orange and T-Mobile, with 3 doing a very good job of catching up (3 is an exclusively 3g network, i am not sure who they are owned by).
I am very sucseptible to "let's have another drink"
I was able to read those two sentences and know what they meant. "per year" and "per day" are clearly different time period. If you really didn't understand on first read I think you need to slow down a bit, rather than just plowing through the summary and (apparently) reading only every other word. The article is very clear, it's your comprehension that's the problem here.
AccountKiller
everytime I read a comment here bemoaning how many useless features mobile phones have "that nobody use".
Based on these statistics, people in the UK send roughly 50 times as many text messages each year as people in the US. Factoring in the relative population sizes, on average we send 250 times as many SMSs as you guys do.
You might not use those "useless features" on your phones, but we most certainly do. Entire message boards exist solely to compare the picture quality and associated features of the various camera phones, which is a serious deciding factor for some people when buying a new phone...
It's official. Most of you are morons.
NOt only that, the statistics are WRONG.
4 billion text messages per month are sent in the US. This is according to the Mobile Messaging Alliance, a industry group of carriers. www.mma.com
Maybe they ment 700 Million per year for Virgin? Thats about right.
As the statistics say (not very clearly), texting is far more popular in the UK (and I would assume Europe, too) than the US. Cue lots of americans saying it's expensive and crap and don't understand why it's so popular.
Reason is that texting is cheap and universal in Europe (inc. the UK) because of the GSM network prevalent there, plus all sorts of organisations jumping onto the texting bandwagon to encourage people to text more.